Poolesville Presbyterian Church
02.05.12; Rev. David Williams
It’s been nearly a decade since I started making that regular trip across the American Legion Bridge, and I’ll confess that as a lifelong Virginian, there are still some things about Maryland that I just don’t get.
I’m sure the feeling is mutual, particularly now that things are getting odd over there in the capital of the Old Dominion. Take, for instance, the recent push in the Virginia State Senate to eliminate restrictions on multiple simultaneous handgun purchases. It’s not that you can’t buy a handgun in Virginia, or legally own a handgun in Virginia. It’s just that under standing Virginia law, you can only buy one a month.
Clearly, this gets in the way of Christmas and Hanukkah gun shopping. How can I buy a Pink Walther P22 for my wife and a pair of Ruger SR22s for the boys if I’ve got to wait a whole month between purchases? Sure, I could plan ahead and take my time, but I shop like a man, so that just wouldn’t work for me.
It might seem that most Virginians would be perfectly capable of defending their household against marauding hordes of bandits and/or Democrats with one pistol. But what if my plan for defending my household involves leaping sideways through the air in slow motion Matrix bullet time while simultaneously dual-wielding two Glocks? Unless the law is changed, I’d have to wait a whole month before I could do that. So Virginia’s State Senate is working to change that law, although their efforts to change the laws of Newtonian physics to permit slow mo shooting may get hung up in committee.
That this is a legislative priority might be confusing to some Marylanders.
I, on the other hand, am always confused by Maryland’s endless dabbling with gambling as a revenue source. With the expansion of slots once again coming before the Maryland State Senate tomorrow, I confess to find slots baffling. For me, slots just seem like the worst possible video game EVER. A game that involves no skill, no strategy, no storyline, and over which you have only the illusion of control? That, and fifty bucks gets you only two hours of gameplay? I’m never going to play that game. I’m not even going to download the demo.
That said, I conceptually grasp the neurology of gambling as a compulsion, how intermittent and random rewards generate a greater tendency to repeat an action. Because of this, it’s a great way to take money from addictive personalities, the gullible, and the desperate.
Clearly, people want roads that have been maintained sometime in the last decade, and decent schools, and competent and professional law enforcement, and all the infrastructure that makes for good and efficient government. But to have those things, you have to pay for them. Paying for them means taxes or tolls, in the same way that buying anything involves paying for it.
But it’s far easier to convince people to do something if they think they can do it without any sacrifice at all. Why pay for something, if you can get people to just dump money into bright flashing machines and then use that cash to pay for it?
Someone else makes the sacrifice, so you don’t have to. Someone else gives, and you just sit back and enjoy the fruits of their loss. It’s a strange way to run a government.
It’s also, quite frankly, one of the things I struggle with most as I read through the letter to the Hebrews. Hebrews is a challenging letter on many fronts, particularly for our twenty-first century sensibilities.
It was written late in the Apostolic era, and we honestly have no clue who actually wrote it. For a while in the early church, there were some who thought it had been written by Paul. But the text itself does not claim that, and the theology and priestly focus make Pauline authorship unlikely. Scholars at the time the King James Bible was produced suggested that Paul’s companion Timothy wrote it. Martin Luther argued that it was most likely to have been Apollos, a prominent early Christian from Alexandria who is mentioned in both Paul’s letters and the Book of Acts.
Modern scholarship tends to favor Luther’s perspective, because Alexandria was a city of learning, and the letter of Hebrews itself is so uncompromisingly High Church. The language, structure, and tone of the letter indicates a writer of unusual refinement and sophistication. To put it into soap operatic terms, if 2 Corinthians is “Days of Our Lives,” then Hebrews would be “Downton Abbey.”
The “letter” itself is less a letter than a theological treatise. Although it concludes with reference to a visit by the writer, the beginning of Hebrews starts with the phrase “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in may and various ways by the prophets,” which can hardly be considered to be a warm opening salutation.
The purpose of Hebrews as a theological essay is relatively straightforward. It’s a sustained exploration of the identity of Jesus of Nazareth, seen through the lenses of the Hebrew priesthood. Jesus is identified both as the ideal priest, but also...as is indicated in verses 17 and 18 of chapter 2, as the “sacrifice of atonement.” The essential principle behind this theology is that Christ’s death is similar to the sacrifices in the temple. This sacrificial way of understanding Jesus is explored in more depth in chapter 9 and the early portion of chapter 10, and is often described as substitutionary atonement. God is angry with us, but instead kills Jesus, who absorbs God’s anger against us.
While this is a fairly core assertion of Christian theology, I’ve always had to wrestle with it. The idea that the God who is love should demand a blood sacrifice has always been difficult to reconcile conceptually.
This is something that other Christians have wrestled with deeply as well, and no one I’ve studied has been more mightily challenged by the concept than 19th century Scottish mystic George MacDonald. MacDonald was C.S. Lewises spiritual master, and one of the most intense theological minds you’ll ever encounter. His writings are just smart, hard, bare-knuckled and uncompromising theology, applied directly to the forehead with all the merciless intensity of a Scots intellectual. MacDonald burns bright like fire, and he gets God in a way that goes well beyond abstract knowledge.
Primary among these is the emphasis on how completely human Jesus was, how deeply connected he was to the struggles and losses of humankind. He was, or so we hear in Hebrews 2:17-18, “..like his brothers and sisters in every respect..” and “..himself..tested by what he suffered.”
MacDonald, as a mystic whose theology was formed not by doctrine but by personal encounter with God, had no patience whatsoever for the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. This is a basic assumption for many Christians, but MacD viewed it as essentially pagan, little more than a cultic sacrifice. He saw it as a fundamental misunderstanding of Christ's person and teachings, the central teachings of the apostles, and the nature of God. For MacDonald, God is ferocious, absolute Love, and there's no way to reconcile God's essential nature with the popular version of this theology. And Lord ha' mercy, he's gonna be tellin' ya 'bout it.
It is in that connection, in that depth of awareness of both God’s grace and human weakness, that is most significant for the author of Hebrews. In Jesus, we encounter the intent and purpose and power of our Creator, but God also encounters us. It is not that God demands the blood of Jesus, like some cruel and bloodthirsty demigod. It is that in Christ, the depth of God’s relationship to us, participation in us, and love for us is shown.
That depth of connection can be hard to process, particularly in a culture that struggles with the idea of sacrifice. Our society thrives on the cult of self. We yearn for power over others, and we seek the easy way out, the way that involves us giving as little as we can for as much as we can get. When all we’re taught to chase is self-interest, guns and gambling, power and profit, sacrifice can seem an odd thing. The radical compassion that was required to give over an entire life to teaching compassion to others does not process.
That someone would choose to give themselves to walk with us and teach us and heal us, and that they wouldn’t be broken from that path even by the worst we had to offer...well...that’s a transforming thing. It’s a sacred thing. Sacrifice, of course, means nothing more than “to make holy.” It’s what Jesus was all about. Making this creation holy. And as we embrace the ethic and the Spirit that filled him, it’s our task as well, no matter which side of the Potomac we call home.
Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
Primary among these is the emphasis on how completely human Jesus was, how deeply connected he was to the struggles and losses of humankind. He was, or so we hear in Hebrews 2:17-18, “..like his brothers and sisters in every respect..” and “..himself..tested by what he suffered.”
MacDonald, as a mystic whose theology was formed not by doctrine but by personal encounter with God, had no patience whatsoever for the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. This is a basic assumption for many Christians, but MacD viewed it as essentially pagan, little more than a cultic sacrifice. He saw it as a fundamental misunderstanding of Christ's person and teachings, the central teachings of the apostles, and the nature of God. For MacDonald, God is ferocious, absolute Love, and there's no way to reconcile God's essential nature with the popular version of this theology. And Lord ha' mercy, he's gonna be tellin' ya 'bout it.
It is in that connection, in that depth of awareness of both God’s grace and human weakness, that is most significant for the author of Hebrews. In Jesus, we encounter the intent and purpose and power of our Creator, but God also encounters us. It is not that God demands the blood of Jesus, like some cruel and bloodthirsty demigod. It is that in Christ, the depth of God’s relationship to us, participation in us, and love for us is shown.
That depth of connection can be hard to process, particularly in a culture that struggles with the idea of sacrifice. Our society thrives on the cult of self. We yearn for power over others, and we seek the easy way out, the way that involves us giving as little as we can for as much as we can get. When all we’re taught to chase is self-interest, guns and gambling, power and profit, sacrifice can seem an odd thing. The radical compassion that was required to give over an entire life to teaching compassion to others does not process.
That someone would choose to give themselves to walk with us and teach us and heal us, and that they wouldn’t be broken from that path even by the worst we had to offer...well...that’s a transforming thing. It’s a sacred thing. Sacrifice, of course, means nothing more than “to make holy.” It’s what Jesus was all about. Making this creation holy. And as we embrace the ethic and the Spirit that filled him, it’s our task as well, no matter which side of the Potomac we call home.
Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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